Cologne, Germany – tagtraum industries is pleased to announce the release of beaTunes 5, featuring a fresh new UI theme, usability improvements, and state-of-the-art audio analysis algorithms. beaTunes excels at fixing metadata tags, finding matching songs, and automatically calculating musical key and tempo – features valued by music enthusiasts, DJs, and athletes alike. It is available for Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows.

The most obvious new feature in beaTunes 5 is the beautiful dark UI theme – but that is not the only thing that is new. Using machine learning, both the key estimation and the tempo detection algorithms have been completely re-engineered and are now more accurate than ever. The timbre-based color concept from version 4 and earlier has been replaced with a new color scheme that also takes rhythmic properties into account. This allows more meaningful song-matching based on color. Song-matching in general has been improved, thanks to new rules like “similar artist”, an ontology-based genre similarity, and a general popularity rule. The latter supports users in building playlists with instantly recognizable songs. Furthermore, beaTunes 5 lets users label their songs as either acoustic or electronic. Of course there is a matching rule for that, too.

For the first time ever, beaTunes can not only match songs with tracks from your local library, but also with current top songs from Amazon or Beatport. For the latter, 2min previews can be played straight from the app. Naturally, Beatport top songs can also be viewed in the charts panel.

For DJs who prefer not to use keylocking, but still want to mix harmonically, beaTunes 5 offers a special view option that shows keys the way they would be, if songs were played with a different tempo.

In order to quickly scan through a list of tracks, beaTunes now offers a scan mode that only plays a configurable part of each track and then moves on – very useful for getting an overview. And while AIFF and WAV audio formats were partially supported before, the new release adds ID3 tagging support for both.
Another functionality that has been improved is audio normalization. Audio normalization is a method to make different songs sound equally loud, even though they were mixed at different loudness levels. beaTunes 5 supports gain adjustment with both ReplayGain 1 and the more recent standard ITU-R BS.1770 (also known as EBU R128, ATSC A/85 or ReplayGain 2) and embeds the results as tags.

One of beaTunes’ strengths has always been metadata correction – either fully automatic via analysis, via inspection, or manually via entry dialogs. Manual entry has been improved in different ways. Smart mass-editing helpfully assists the user when changing artist or album names directly in the main song table. Usually such changes need to be applied to other tracks as well. beaTunes offers to make such changes automatically. In the regular song metadata editor, reference checks have been extended to use data from beaTunes’ own extensive and improved database, Last.fm, Discogs, Beatport, and Wikidata, leveraging the semantic web. To give the user additional orientation, beaTunes displays where correction suggestions are from and how reliable they are.
Lots of other little features and improvements made it into this release. Among them built-in CSV and WPL playlist export, explicit media kind support, playlist re-ordering by property (e.g. BPM), better social media integration, a completely new album info panel based on Wikipedia data, support for custom fields, and lots of other things.

One last feature that deserves to be listed individually is the new “Play similar songs” control. It puts beaTunes into radio mode. Once started, beaTunes keeps on playing songs similar to the originally selected song. This is based on color, instrumentation and other features, which means it works better with libraries of a couple of thousand songs that have been fully analyzed. The feature is intended to help people who just want to listen to some music – without having to curate and maintain a playlist.

Overall, version 5 continues the evolution of this indispensable tool for music lovers. It’s getting more and more refined, making music analysis and library management easier than ever.

Pricing and Availability:
beaTunes 5 is available for $34.95 (USD). beaTunes 4.x users can upgrade for $11.95 (USD). A 14 day trial demo is available. The trial version does not allow users to apply one-click solutions to inspection issues. NFR licenses and additional materials are available for media reviewers.

tagtraum industries incorporated is an indy software shop founded in 2004 by Hendrik Schreiber in Raleigh, North Carolina. Its main focus lies on DSP/MIR, Mac software, Java-based solutions, architecture, implementation and optimization. tagtraum’s operational base is Cologne, Germany. Copyright (C) 2017 tagtraum industries incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo and macOS platforms are trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Beatport and the Beatport logo are trademarks of Beatport LLC. in the U.S. and/or other countries.